Unhappy birthday

There are precious few crumbs of comfort for Gordon Brown in the voters' verdict on his first full year in office. This week's Guardian-ICM poll - putting Labour on an abject 25%, a record 20 points behind the Conservatives - confirms the collapse signalled by last month's local elections and the Crewe and Nantwich byelection. But the poll also underlines that the prime minister himself is part of the problem. Labour should not duck the ICM figures just because they make such uncomfortable reading.

ICM found that just 19% of 2005 Labour voters think Mr Brown's style has been a change for the better, against 67% who think it a change for the worse. Only 31% of Labour 2005 voters think the policies are better, against 54% who think they are worse. Among the public as a whole only 2% say their opinion of Mr Brown has gone up since June 2007, against 49% who say it has gone down. A majority of Labour voters think the party will not win next time if Mr Brown remains leader. Where Mr Blair regularly ran ahead of his party in popularity, and thus boosted Labour, Mr Brown runs behind the party, and so drags it down. For a man who stood outside No 10 a year ago this week promising "a new government with new priorities" and pledging to "let the work of change begin", it has been a harrowing comedown.

How has it happened? The short answer is that Mr Brown sacrificed strategy to tactics. After a brief honeymoon, he lost his nerve about calling an election that he and his allies had foolishly promoted, then denied he had done so because of the polls. Overnight Mr Brown lost his accumulated political dignity. A series of accidents, missteps and dithers followed, culminating most recently in the 42-day detention debacle. Most damaging of all was the unravelling of the 10p tax rate abolition, which struck at the heart of Mr Brown's reputations for competence and for principle, while also exposing his increasingly tangled difficulty in telling the wood from the trees - and indeed the trees from the branches and twigs.

Yet though Mr Brown bears a heavy personal responsibility, it is dishonest to dump all the blame on him or to pretend that Labour under a different leader - least of all Mr Blair - could have easily avoided much of what has gone wrong. Part of this is simply the electoral cycle. After 11 years in office, any Labour leader would find it hard to reinvigorate a government with which some voters have simply grown bored. Another part of the problem is the economic downturn. After a decade of growth and prosperity for which Labour took the credit, people are short of money and the prices of basics are rising, so now they blame Labour instead. Remember also that there have been changes for the better: a calmer approach to foreign policy, notably towards the United States, a less confrontational attitude to the public sector at home, and a more seemly and sober ethos in the conduct of government. All of these are still there, actual strengths and potential assets.

Labour people say hesitantly that they think the worst may now be over. Yet 12 traumatic months suggest that any revival, either in government or opposition, will require not just more tinkering but much clearer thinking and exposition about the priorities of the next decade. The era in which markets were the consensus political solution to almost everything is becoming nearly as outmoded as the preceding era in which collectivisation was the mantra. The task now is to marry the two better. The largest political priorities of the age are about safeguarding the poor and the middle class against the effects of the failures and excesses of markets and about pre-empting a process of climate change that threatens life on earth as we have known it. The future will belong to politicians who can speak naturally and honestly to these concerns. Labour, and Mr Brown, are not currently doing that. They have a lot to do to prove that the future belongs to them.